


Rewind

by catty_the_spy



Series: #verse [3]
Category: Stargate: Universe
Genre: Anxiety, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Illness, Implied Character Death, M/M, Nightmares, Trauma, genetic modifications, inappropriate responses to medical mysteries, non-linear timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-04
Updated: 2012-12-04
Packaged: 2017-11-20 06:32:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 8,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/582333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catty_the_spy/pseuds/catty_the_spy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being back on Destiny is like taking a trip through time. That doesn't mean everything's fixed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

They’re advancing on him. They can’t see him, but they know he’s there. All it’ll take is for one of them to look up, and….

Young shoots twice. Headshots, he hopes. He waits.

Nothing.

When he thinks enough time has passed, he climbs out of the tree.

He trades knife for gun as he steps closer to the bodies. He doesn’t like it; he has to get too close to use the knife.

The aliens are small but strong. Just one of them was able to pick him up and sling through to…to here. Wherever he is.

He searches them. They have what looks like rope, a striker, and something he thinks might be canteens. He takes them all. By his count he’s been here a month, at least. Maybe longer.

 

Rush flinched at every noise, but he didn’t comment when Young snuck into his room.

Young didn’t always sneak in – sometimes he started out the night there, sometimes Rush came and got him. When he did sneak in, Rush was always curled up on the floor, and he never turned him away.

There’s no talking involved. They just hold on to each other, and there’s always too much noise – the ship, their breathing, their hearts – but it’s always just quiet enough, just _familiar_ enough, to work.

He keeps expecting Rush to push him away, and Rush always surprises him by letting him stick around.

Young pauses in skinning one of the lemur-things. Its heart isn’t beating, but its eyes…its eyes were following him.

Disturbed, he tries to cut the head off. What stops him isn’t bone, but wiring. Wiring. God, the entire thing was….

The more flesh he peels back, the more technology he sees. There were fucking computer chips of some kind tucked into its stomach.

Young stumbles away to puke. When his intestines are done trying to climb out his mouth, he turns back to the carcass.

There’s no way he was going to eat that. He buries it instead.

He goes on a few missions – never long ones. The desert planet is fine, quiet. He sticks close to the gate, catches a lizard, waits for his team to find the mineral they need. It’s pretty flat; no place for the enemy to hide. His team comes back okay. He lets the lizard go.

The jungle planet is hard. It’s raining – no, not just raining, storming. It almost drives him back to the ship but he sticks it out.

They came for food, but the rain makes it hard to see. They take the opportunity to gather water. Scott spends an inordinate amount of time in the wet, deliberately walking through puddles and the streams of water that cascade down. It’s strange, but Young flinches at each flash of lightening, so he figures he doesn’t have room to criticize.

It’s nice to be among trees again. He climbs a few; it’s hard when it’s wet, but he’s done it before. Rush was better – lighter, better knees – but Young had a few months on him. He figures he was lucky that he never broke any bones, wonders whether the toad aliens had anything to do with it, whether they would have fixed him or had fixed him already. He tries not to think too much about it.

He gets odd looks, concerned looks, but no one says anything. Scott takes the cut branch without a word.

It occurs to him – when they’re back on Destiny, with the fruit and water and a couple of small unlucky animals, dripping everywhere, Scott miraculously less wet than everyone else – it occurs to Young then, that maybe climbing alien trees in the rain is a stupid idea. He’s spent so much time climbing trees these last years – no, those few hours – that it seems natural to him.

 

Young expects Rush to call him an idiot, but all Rush does is sneer at the fruit. “Pitiful.”

Young sighs. “You do it next time, since you’re so much better than me.” He shakes his wet hair out of his eyes; Rush makes a face and steps out of range.

When they manage to get across the species of alien they’re dealing with – the ones who look like toads, the ones they’ve encountered before – Scott gets fidgety. He nods steadily through the rest of their explanation, and under the guise of thinking disappears around a corner. When he comes back, he’s rubbing the back of his head and wincing, but he looks a lot calmer. Rush gives him a look that he ignores.

Scott asks if they can read his lips. Young shrugs, Rush says yes. Scott sends Eli off with a kino remote to open the gate, then asks if they have anything that might muffle the sound. Rush gestures towards the hat he’d made.

Scott takes a second look at their improvised winter gear. Young thinks he’s finally starting to grasp how fast time is moving in the rift.

Rush suggests they take a few plants with them, things they can grow in the hydroponics lab. He has to mouth hydroponics a few times to get it across. Scott taps his watch and shrugs. His first priority is to get them back on the Destiny.

They check their gear on more time – food, hides, canteens, the pieces of the sled which they’d split between them. Then, with a final glance at each other, they step into real-time.

They both jump when someone knocks on Rush’s door.

“Dr. Rush? You’re needed in the control room.” The woman knocks again, once, before the door opens.

Lt. Scott doesn’t look surprised to see them on the floor. “Sir, a representative from Homeworld Command is waiting for you in the stone room.” He has a canteen in one hand – one they brought with them from Earth. He hadn’t shied away from handling the alien canteens, but he was careful never to use one.

To Young, and to Rush, it had been more than three years since his time in an alien lab. To Scott, it had only been a matter of weeks.

Rush sighs and Young nods his agreement.

The woman is gone, but Scott doesn’t leave until both of them are on their way.

TJ doesn’t have much in the way of sedatives to spare, but she uses them that first night, when just sitting quietly in the infirmary is a trial. Young isn’t quite sure how they made it to the infirmary in the first place.

In his dreams he’s haunted by flashing lights.

On earth, it would be much longer before Young returned to active duty, but on Destiny they couldn’t afford it. As soon as TJ was sure they could handle it they were on light duty. With Rush that meant jack shit; he re-familiarized himself with Destiny’s systems, spent a lot of time swatting his team away. For Young, that meant mostly administrative things, discussing resources with Wray – who didn’t bat an eye when he switched back and forth between signing and talking – and Rush if they could find him, yawning through bridge duty, and doing a lot of what amounted to sitting on his ass.

Eventually they all agreed he and Rush could go on missions every once in a while, but the stretch of time leading up to that was dull.

Sleep was difficult. For a while, he didn’t sleep so much as periodically pass out in his bed. He was awake until his body forced him to rest, and then the cycle began again. It was cold, the bed was too soft, little noises kept him awake, and if he was honest with himself, he knew that he’d grown used to feeling Rush’s heartbeat beneath his hands.

One night he got tired of it and snuck into Rush’s room. He slept better after that.


	2. Chapter 2

Every movement is an alien come to send them deeper into the enclosure. Every sound is a gunshot. The beds are uncomfortably soft, and cold. The food is odd after years of living on meat and fruit.

Hour outside, month inside, multiply by forty. It was like stepping out of a time machine.

Rush is coping better than him. But then, Rush has been through this before.

“You’ve been sending your subordinates to make your reports.”

Young deliberately folds his hands behind his back. “I’ve been in the infirmary.”

“What happened?”

“There was an incident on-planet; Lt. Scott will have reported it.”

“I want to hear it from you.”

“Forty months?” TJ repeated, incredulous. “That’s a little over _three years_.”

Rush tries to explain it with his hands, but TJ doesn’t understand him. That’s okay. Young doesn’t really understand it himself.

What they are able to explain is that it’s some kind of lab, that they were being observed. The aliens had sent more patrols after Young got better at evading them; after he starting killing them, they tried harder to keep him.

“Why did you attack?” TJ asks. “Did they…what made you start fighting them?”

Young shrugs, mouths samples, waves it away as nothing. He makes it clear that he started hiding again after he and Rush found each other.

Telford shakes his head at the edited version of Young’s story. “Every off-world prison’s a little different. And you just got out of the infirmary?”

“Yes.” That’s a lie, but Telford doesn’t need to know.

There’s some administrative details, but Young keeps his eyes carefully to the left of Telford’s face. Maybe on Destiny it was an empty gesture, but not to him. Not yet.

“Homeworld Command expects you to make a report soon.”  
Rush scowls. “Will you stop fucking whispering?”

Young shoots a pained look at both of them. To Camille he says “I don’t think that’s gonna work.”

“I figured as much,” she says, folding her arms. “Do you have a plan?”

“Send Scott for now,” Young says, thinking. “Let him give a short summary of events.”

“And hide out on the ship like a bloody coward.”

Young rolls his eyes. “I’m not allowed _off_ the ship right now; TJ’s orders.”

“Loosely interpreted,” Camille says with a small smile. She ignores the look Rush sends her and sighs. “I should go. You’re not the only person who needs to report.”

He goes swimming in a lake on a planet full of them. He’s always been an awkward swimmer, but right now it’s easy. He glides through the water like he was born to it, going deeper and deeper, heart pounding in his chest. He catches a fish and swims to the surface with it – food is always good.

On the shore, everyone is either food gathering or getting some time in the sun. Scott’s taken a dip too, but now he’s sitting at the edge of the water trying to fish. He smiles. “I didn’t know you could hold your breath that long, sir.”

Young tosses the fish onto the grass. “Neither did I.”

“Varro found some eggs,” Scott continues, squinting into the sun. He sticks his feet in the water. “So far, you’re the one with the most luck catching fish.”

A short distance away, Park is sitting next to Greer, her face turned up towards the sun. Greer’s talking; from the sounds of it, he’s describing the planet to her. It’s a quiet place, not a lot of animals. A couple of scientists were digging for worms.

“I’ll see if I can catch some more,” Young says. When he’s pushing off, he almost sees a film between his fingers; must be a trick of the light.

For a while, he takes his meals anywhere but the mess. It’s easy enough when he’s still in the infirmary, but when he’s in his own quarters it becomes a matter of figuring out when the smallest amount of people will be present so he can slip in and out, or finding reasons to have one person bring lunch for everyone.

He drops in on the science team a lot. Rush is hardly ever there to call him on it.

Destiny stops by a planet where they find hundreds of something like sheep. They’re in a valley, and the valley is full of alien sheep. They don’t see any sign of shepherds, but they do see pterodactyls or something – off in the distance, and people shy. They keep an eye out, in case the pterodactyls attack, or they get caught thieving.

They don’t just take sheep. There are these blue potatoes, and something that’s either carrots or hemlock.

Butchering animals is messy business; they use as much as they can. They don’t have a freezer – there might be one somewhere, in one of the unexplored areas of the ship, but not in the habitable area.

“We’re keeping these?” Greer asks, poking the hides with the toe of his boot.

“Yep,” Young says.

James chuckles. “Think of all the _socks_.”

He grins, ignoring the teasing. “Yes, socks, blankets, anything. Unless they find a way to dial in soon, we’re going to need things like that. To be honest, I wish we could do some shearing on a few of these things. Who knows when we’re gonna get another opportunity like this.”

“It’s going to be interesting making yarn out of this,” James says. She doesn’t touch them with her bloody hands. “I mean, I read a book once where they talked about carding and stuff, but I don’t know anyone who can do all that. I mean, actually do it.”

“Wray can knit,” Young says, “Barnes and Dunning know how to crochet. As for the other stuff, we can get some advice from earth.”

“That’s gonna be interesting,” Greer says. “That’s gonna require building some equipment. I don’t think whittling’s enough to cut it.”

Young shrugs. “We have to start sometime. Better now than when we’re in desperate need of it.”

Young doesn’t know what wakes him up. They’re on the bed this time. He opens his eyes to Rush scribbling on a sheet of paper – probably pilfered from Brody’s project, which was a perpetual work in progress.

Young pokes him in the side. Rush puts his pencil in his mouth and passes a hand over Young’s eyes. Young’s too tired to inquire further. He curl’s into Rush’s side to block out the faint light and goes back to sleep.

Young runs his hand up Rush’s flank, the lightest of touches, smiling at the hitch in Rush’s breath. He’s felt it – the sharp upward motion – but he’s never heard it before.

Rush catches the hand, and Young sees it, the film between his fingers, up to the first knuckle. He jerks, but Rush grabs his arm. “Later. Don’t think about it right now.” He breathes it into Young’s ear, traces the film with his thumb, his other hand sliding across Young’s stomach. “Don’t think.”

He saw it before Young did. He already knew.


	3. Chapter 3

Scott, always drinking something, or dodging a canteen thrown at his head.

Scott, always in the water, and never as wet as he should be.

Something strange is going on. And the way Scott looks to Rush, sometimes, it’s easy to guess that Rush is involved. 

“They must have done it one of the times they knocked us back,” Rush muses, turning Young’s hand this way and that to get a good look at the webbing between his fingers.

“And what is it that they’ve done exactly?”

There’s no need to specify who “they” are.

“Altered you,” says Rush, “on a genetic level. This isn’t the only change, though what the others are is unclear. I’ll find out eventually.”

“What do you mean ‘you’ll find out eventually’? How? I’m not gonna be your guinea pig! And what makes you so sure, anyway?”

Rush has Young’s right hand in both of his own. He lifts them to eyelevel. “When I touch you, I know.”

“Is it just me, or is Rush acting weird? …Weird-er?”

“He got abducted twice in less than a month,” Park says. “That’d make anyone weird.”

“It’s not just that,” Eli says. “I mean, he’s really freaking me out.”

“He’s also never here.”

“He just spent three years with no one but Colonel Young for company,” Brody says. “I think anyone would need some alone time. No offence,” he adds, glancing towards Young.

Young waves his spoon dismissively.

“He’s in here?” Park hisses. “Why didn’t anybody tell me?”

“We thought you heard when he came in,” says Volker. “He said something when I went for lunch.”

They start arguing over whether or not Young announced his presence. Young shakes his head and goes back to his food.

“They were trying to do to me what they eventually did to Lieutenant Scott, only instead of absorbing liquids as expected, I absorbed information.” Rush shrugs nonchalantly, but Young can see the subtle tension in him. “As they had no way of knowing this, the experiment on me was considered a failure; Scott was a step forward.”

“What does that make me?”

“A success.”

“I’ve worked out a way to access some of the less damaged sections of the ship,” Rush says out of the blue.

Young blinks at him, startled. “Okay. Is that what you’ve been up to these past few weeks?”

“I needed to make sure I was using the correct layout.” Rush sounds like he’s only half paying attention. “I did most of the work from memory.”

Rush is squinting at a small corner of a piece of paper; most of the page – back and front – is covered in tiny writing. His fingers are smudged black. His hair is still longer in front than in back, just as Young cut it forever ago. He’s been rubbing his temples – there are streaks of black all over his face. His clothes are threadbare and fit him wrong after numerous washes and years of lost weight, and his beard makes him look like a wild man. He looks ridiculous. Young’s never been fonder of him.

“Did you involve the science team at all?”

“That bunch of idiots? Of course not.”

Young rolls his eyes. “They might have helped speed up the process.”

“Maybe Chloe,” Rush says. “The rest of them are useless.”

Young raises his eyebrows. “Eli?”

“…less useless than the rest.”

“Of course.” Young lets out an exasperated sigh. “Tell me about it with the rest of the science team in the morning. We’ll discuss it then.”

They aren’t touching. There’s a small space between their arms.

Rush is breathing like he’s already on his way to sleep, as if the information he just gave Young is nothing major. Maybe to Rush it isn’t.

_”When I touch you, I know.”_ God, that was so vague. Knew what? Could read his thoughts? His emotions? His memories?

_”When I touch you, I know.”_ and Rush has been touching him on a regular basis for months now. Years. What does he know, exactly?

Rush only explains what he feels like explaining. To Rush, his ability to absorb information – whatever that means – isn’t worth explaining.

And Young is changing too now. He lifts his hands to look at the film between his fingers. Not even Rush with his poorly explained new talents, has any idea what’s going to happen to him. A curl of panic rises in his chest and he takes a deep breath.

He won’t be able to sleep like this.

He won’t.

The wind is insane.

Chloe stares out the front of the cave, watching the wind bend the stubby bushes nearly in half. “It’s the wind wutherin’ round the house.” She grins sheepishly at the odd looks she gets. “Secret Garden. I read it a lot when I was little.”

“Foraging is going to have to wait until the wind dies down,” says Young, having to almost shout to be heard. “How much time do we have on the clock?”

“Six hours,” Brody shouts.

Quinn, a civilian scientist who’s hardly ever been off the ship, looks more than a little put out. She’d been looking forward to food gathering in the sun.

Barnes looks exhausted; she isn’t the only one.

“Try and rest up,” Young says. “I’ll keep watch.”

There’s no way he’s going to sleep like this. It’s too loud, and to be honest, he misses Rush. He makes a metal note never to tell him.

He wakes curled around Rush, the other man’s heart beating slowly under his hands. He doesn’t move for a long moment.

“Are you done being ridiculous?” Rush says.

“How am I being ridiculous?” asks Young, not bothering to open his eyes.

“Wasting time being upset about nonsense.”

Of course Rush would call it nonsense. Of course.

“Fuck you.”

Rush pushes him off. “Unlike you, I have work to do.”

Young takes his time getting up, huddled in the bed long after Rush is gone.

_“When I touch you, I know.”_

What exactly was it that Rush knew?


	4. Chapter 4

Someone’s iPod is playing something instrumental.  
Other than that, the observation deck is quiet. There are a few people playing cards or mending their clothes. A couple of people are meditating.

Young enjoys the quiet and the company. Rush is hiding in the depths of the ship again, doing God knows what, and Young still isn’t comfortable being by himself. He’s taking the time to do some paperwork – mission reports and logs on a laptop someone had donated for this particular use; he was several weeks in the hole on that front.

He hears Camille before he sees her.

“-carding. I think maybe my great-grandmother _might_ have known something about it, but I think we’d have to get a specialist from earth.”

“Is there anyone in the Stargate program who would know about that?” That’s Park. “I mean, I don’t think that’s a pretty common skill anymore.”

“It’s not so much finding someone who knows how to do it as finding someone worth giving security clearance. Colonel.”

Young waves. “Hi. I see you’re discussing our wool issue.”

“What gave it away?” Camille says, with a small smile. They speak softly, reluctant to break the still of the room.

“Varro says he knows something about spinning, if we can get the right equipment.” Park sounds excited. “He also knows how to make soap!”

Young smiles. “He’s a regular jack of all trades.” He invites them to sit down. “We need to come up with a skill list – things we know how to do, things we need to learn.”

Camille nods. “Hope for the best, plan for the worst. I’ll get started on that. Also, Lisa and I want to talk to you about the hydroponics lab.”

They come upon them suddenly, and Young doesn’t think, he acts. It’s no use hiding; there’s nothing to hide behind. The toad aliens have their weapons out.

Young aims for the heads; there are three. The first two go down easy. The third gets out of the way in time. Someone else gets the fourth shot in.

Young doesn’t hesitate to go in with his knife. Cutting their throats has worked before. Then he searches them.

The hand on his shoulder startles him. He half expects it to be Rush, but it’s Greer.

“We need to go back to the gate.” While he says it, Young’s hands keep moving. Rope? Keep. Full canteen? Keep. Boots? Wrong shape. Knife? Keep. Weapon? Interesting but not a priority – the proportions are wrong anyway.

Greer must have called his name a few times to touch Young on the shoulder. His ears were still ringing from the gunshots; he hadn’t heard.

He’ll worry about it later.

Columns of steam rise from deep pits; even these are ringed with green, life soldiering on in even the most unlikely conditions.

“Do you think any of this is edible?” James asks, squatting to get a closer look at some of the leafiest vegetation.

“It’s a possibility,” Young says, eyes roaming the horizon.

“The crystals should be nearby,” Rush snaps, trying to keep them on task.

The air is breathable but dense. The level of humidity makes it feel like breathing molasses. Hauling those crystals back is going to be interesting.

James tentatively peeks into one of the pits. “I think I found some.” She steps out of the way to let Rush look for himself, wiping sweat off her forehead. “They’re not too far down, but we’ll need some gloves.”

Young grabs his radio. “Evans, come in.”

While they wait for Evans to show up with one of the two pairs of heavy gloves, James pokes at the plant life, trying to see if it’s worth taking back. Rush pushes his soaked hair out of his face, wiping the condensation from his glasses. It’s a futile gesture; as soon as he leans into the pit again, his glasses fog up.

“Is there enough?” Young asks, coming closer.

“Perhaps,” Rush says, squinting, then he looks up at Young as if something’s just occurred to him. “Can you breathe?”

Young blinks. “Um. Yeah. Can you? Do you need to go back to the-”

“Good. If you start feeling short of breath, go back to the ship.”

“What on earth are you-?”

Evans arrives with the gloves, and they put their conversation on hold as their attention returns to the crystals. In the back of Young’s mind, while James and Rush work together to cut the crystals free, he wonders what the hell Rush was talking about.

There are three teams on the planet, all of them looking for food and other supplies. He doesn’t start to calm down until he sees them all grouped around the gate, looking uncertain.

Brody dials. Young’s eyes scan the surrounding area restlessly. They could be anywhere; they could have another rift here, another lab, and his people could end up trapped there – too many of his people, if it was just him he’d hate it but it wouldn’t be so bad but this is more than just him and….

He’s the last one through the gate.

He’s never been happier to set eyes on the gate room.

“We could use this area for hydroponics until we repair the dome,” Rush says, gesturing at the three dimensional map in the middle of the room. “It’s larger than the room we’re using now, and these connecting rooms look to have been designed for the purpose.”

Chloe makes an addition to the list chalked onto the wall. “Food. Got it.”

“This…” Eli pauses. “I honestly have no idea what this is. Too big for living quarters, too small for a communal area.”

Chloe puts a question mark beside that room on the list. Young, watching from the back of the room, makes a mental note to look for chalk the next time they go on a gathering mission.

They find a workshop in the bowels of the ship. Most of the tools there are unusable because they have no idea what they’re for – the Ancients didn’t leave any instruction manuals.

It’s fortuitous though. There are saws.

Young decides to get Camille some knitting needles. He owes her.

“I think this is a nail gun,” Brody says. “And this is a welder.”

“Is that a kiln?” James points to a structure in the corner and Young shrugs.

It’s a large room, with a number of rooms branching off from it. One of them – a storage area with hammers, hand saws, and unidentifiable items – has a hole in the ceiling that leads to the room above it. When Young stands in the center, he can see several floors above, the hull breech at the very top small and distant.

“Sir!”

Young follows James’ call deeper into the workshop, where another storage area holds materials – sheets of metal, wiring, a few cracked control crystals. They won’t be able to do anything for the damaged hull, but rooms that were inaccessible because of missing floors will be searchable now.

“Nice find,” he says, leaning in to get a closer look at what may be a pair of tongs. James offers him her gloves, but he declines, mindful of the film between his fingers. He wonders, idly, how many people have noticed. Not many; not if TJ hasn’t said anything. He should tell TJ.

He should have told TJ _already_ , but if he’s being honest with himself, he hasn’t because that would make it more real. If he and Rush are the only people that know, maybe it’s just a hallucination induced my isolation in a time bubble. If TJ knows…. No. He forces his focus back to the workshop.


	5. Chapter 5

The nightmare is completely silent.

Emily stands over him with a tray of syringes. She’s crying, and he doesn’t know why. One of the toad aliens takes a syringe off the tray and stabs the needle into Young’s throat.

He can’t breathe.

Emily puts her hand on his cheek, and he grabs her arm, says “Help me” with his mouth. He can’t hear it, but he knows he says it. He can’t scream it; he doesn’t have the air.

Her hand is cold; her heart isn’t beating.

He can feel the wires under her skin.

The area they decide to move hydroponics to is connected to a refrigeration unit. Young has never seen so many people happy to find a freezer.

One of the rooms branching off might have been a kitchen. It’s impossible to tell, because most of that room has fallen into the one below it.

They’ll scavenge the debris for parts, later.

Moving hydroponics takes the better part of a day. It’s not the most exciting task in the world, but spirits are high. After the bulk of the work is done, someone breaks out the liquor, and they have a bit of a party.

Young doesn’t participate beyond some heavy lifting, but he watches from the sidelines as his people celebrate this small slice of good fortune.

They need more nights like this.

“What exactly did they change about Scott?” Young asks, carefully positioned on his side of the bed.

For the most part, Rush is ignoring him, but this time he responds. “He absorbs liquids.”

“That’s it?”

“Liquids, and anything that’s dissolved in them. It wasn’t anything drastic.”

“Am I going to-”

“You haven’t yet,” Rush says, almost dismissively. “It’s likely you won’t.”

Young thinks about asking “What makes you so sure?” He thinks about telling Rush that the film is between his toes as well. He thinks about yelling. He thinks about panicking. He thinks about doing any number of things.

Instead, he closes his eyes and controls his breathing.

The next planet they visit, they find more sheep. Another huge field of them. That shouldn’t be possible.

“The aliens,” Rush says, scowling at the kino footage. “We already know they have some form of interplanetary travel.”

“Sheep, though?”

“They can’t all devote their lives to genetic experiments.” Rush pauses. “We should take them anyway. We don’t have enough food that we can afford to be choosy.”

Young does his paperwork in the gateroom until the team returns.

They take more sheep than last time, because of the newly discovered freezer, and the workshop has given them the gift of makeshift shears. Despite the threat of alien abduction, the team is all smiles.

Maybe the threat of alien abduction is becoming commonplace.

He has nightmares almost every night – dreams of his body changing beyond recognition, dreams of his people kidnapped and tortured, Rush dying over and over again, him _killing_ Rush, TJ bleeding on the floor, Scott soaking up the blood of a pile of bodies…

The worst ones are the ones he doesn’t remember. Rush wakes him, always gentle, and that’s how Young can tell how bad they are. Rush always shrugs him off, slaps him aside. Even his kisses turn into bites.

But when Young’s had one of _those_ nightmares – the kind he can never remember – Rush is always gentle with him.

He’s a little nervous about allowing it, but Young agrees to give the crew some r&r when they drop out for forty-eight hours at a particularly lush planet.

That doesn’t mean just sitting in the sun – each shift spends their time foraging. But to people who seldom leave the ship, even that can be fun.

Varro’s shift comes back with wood and something that might be honey. People gather fruit and skin rabbits.

Chloe practically dances back onto the ship, flowers tucked into her hair. She and Scott look particularly rumpled, like they found a private spot in the wood. Park also returns with more bounce in her step, holding hands with Volker and Greer and babbling excitedly about the flora.

Young keeps in sight of the gate, ill at ease. He does a lot of digging, taking anything that looks edible, and they’re near enough to a stream that he tries to fish. Rush – conveniently – disappeared before he could be assigned a shift on planet.

Blessedly, nothing goes wrong. A couple of people get sunburned, but everyone is safe and sound on the ship three hours before the clock runs down

Young spends a lot of time looking just to the left of a steady stream of specialists. Technically, they were supposed to teach whoever was most interested or most capable, but most of them seem to think “Welcome to Destiny” means “Tell me everything there is to know about cheese.”

He’s not sure how these people even find him. In the mess, on the observation deck, in the control room – the only place they haven’t followed him is Rush’s quarters, but his own seem to be fair game.

“I’m actually a little busy right now” seems to mean “Tell me more!” in specialist-speak, and these people can talk for _hours_ given the least bit of prompting.

All that seems to work is ignoring them and hoping to be rescued. Or hiding in Rush’s quarters.  
That’s starting to seem like the better option.

The second thing to come out of the workshop – after the makeshift shears – is a drop spindle. It’s presented proudly in the mess upon its completion, and everyone takes a moment to fawn over it, barring Rush who barely gives it a second glance.

Young hopes his congratulations don’t seem forced. He has a terrible headache. He spends a lot of time squinting at everything, because the pressure inside his skull is unbearable.

“You have a fever,” Rush says, out of the blue. They’re in his quarters, at some time of the early afternoon. Rush is scribbling on the last empty square of his paper – the sheet looks particularly battered.

Young raises his eyebrows and immediately regrets it. “Did you touch me from all the way across the room?”

“Have you forgotten that this is not the first time I’ve seen you ill?” Rush says, with no small amount of disdain. He crosses the room to put his hand on Young’s forehead; he can’t flinch away fast enough. “Another change is starting to manifest. It appears that in perfecting their technique, they found a way to make the changes gradual. Did they learn that from the number of times they almost killed Lieutenant Scott?” Rush’s voice trails off; he’s thinking about something, maybe about the toad aliens’ poor grasp of the scientific method.

Rush’s hand actually feels amazing on his forehead. Young leans into the touch without thinking.

“You should go to the infirmary before your fever gets any worse,” says Rush. Then he pulls away.

Young takes off his shoes, lowers the lights, and goes to sleep.


	6. Chapter 6

As annoying as the specialists are to him personally, Young has to admit that they’re good for morale.

People flock to them. Several have memorized their schedules. When they give lectures, they always have a large audience, and everyone takes turns reading the careful notes they leave behind or watching the kino recordings. There are long discussions of their new knowledge over meals in the mess, and drunken competitions to see who’s remembered the most.

People will find fun in anything, if you give them the opportunity.

“Colonel?”

Young forces his eyes open to see TJ sitting on the edge of the bed.

“Rush says you’re running a bit of a fever.”

He shrugs a shoulder, lets his eyes close to slits. His head is killing him.

TJ tries to keep him talking as she checks his temperature and his blood pressure. He can tell by the way she holds herself that she’s worried.

With a bit of effort, Young draws a question mark on the thermometer. TJ frowns.

“Too fucking high is what it is,” Rush snaps, and whoa! Young flails a bit trying sit up. “Don’t bother,” Rush adds, and he’s standing behind TJ, Young can see that now. “If you do you’ll throw up.”

TJ asks a series of questions that honestly make Young’s head hurt worse, and then she freezes – suddenly, in the middle of a sentence.

She’s looking at the spaces between his fingers.

Chloe shoots him awkward looks from the other side of the console – clearly trying not to stare but unable to resist the urge to look.

He presses his fingers together.

Eventually she seems to work up the nerve. “Colonel Young?” she whispers, blushing fiercely. “You have a…uh….” She gives the side of her neck a significant rub.

He blinks at her. “What?”

She gives her neck another significant rub, adding a very insistent face. He shakes his head at her. She huffs, pinches her neck, and points.

“Oh.” _Oh_. He tugs awkwardly at his collar, torn between relief and embarrassment. Chloe looks plain embarrassed.

For a long moment they have no idea what to say to each other. Finally, Chloe clears her throat. “Congratulations?” 

Panic grips him like a vice, taking his heart and _squeezing_. His vision tunnels and blurs. His lungs are burning, and the next thing he’s really aware of, TJ’s making him swallow something and she and Rush are talking, and she’s touching his forehead and his neck and his hands, carefully pulling his fingers apart so she can get a closer look.

She says something that he can’t hear over the rush of blood in his ears.

The dream is relatively peaceful. The whole crew is sitting by a lake. It’s sunny and the grass is green.

Young makes a final stitch and ties it off. “What do you think, Lieutenant?”

Scott twists to get a good look. Young’s stitches make a steady zigzag around Scott’s shoulder. “It’s great sir! You got it exactly in place.”

“I’m an old hat with a needle.”

Chloe feeds Scott a bite of her cinnamon bun; Scott’s been very careful not to bleed into the box. Chloe’s wearing some gold earrings Scott bought her at the PX. They reflect light onto the crisscrossing scars on her face. Like Scott, she looks patched together.

Young hears TJ’s laughter and looks towards the lake. She and Varro are splitting a hot dog. As he watches, she wipes her hands on her shirt. When she lifts them away they’re wet with blood – her entire shirt is soaked in it.

Park and Greer run past. Where Park’s eyes should be are two gaping holes.

“I should go find Rush,” Young says. “I’m supposed to sew his head back on.”

“I haven’t seen him,” Chloe says, feeding Scott another bite of the cinnamon bun. One of the pecans falls off, right onto a thick new scar on her thigh. She laughs. “Maybe you should ask Eli.”

Young nods and puts the needle and thread away.

Brody and Volker are roasting Riley over a barbeque. The three of them wave at him as he passes.

“Have you seen Eli?” he asks them.

Riley points into a knot of trees. “I think he’s that way.”

Eli’s sitting under a tree, reading a book.

“Have you seen Dr. Rush?” Young asks.

Eli says something, but Young can’t understand; Eli’s lower jaw is gone.

Young tilts his head to the side. “You know, if you find it, I can sew it back on for you. I’m an old hat with a needle.”

Eli shakes his head. Maybe he’s smiling. He points Young down towards the lake. Rush is sitting there. He scowls when he sees Young. “You’re late,” he snaps, “and you haven’t brought your supplies.”

Young opens his jacket without a word. He keeps his thread where his lungs used to be.

Someone is singing. Young opens his eyes.

He’s in the infirmary. Across from him, Barnes is sitting on a gurney, singing some Beatles song loudly and off-key.

He snorts softly. “The walrus was Paul.”

Barnes jumps and chokes. He watches with an amused smile while she stumbles to her feet, coughing and red-faced. “Sir. How are you feeling?”

“Not so good.”

“Yeah, you’ve got a fever. A pretty bad one actually.”

“And a headache.”

She gives him a sympathetic smile. “TJ said to give you some of that tea if you woke up. The tree bark one?”

Young makes a face. “How much of that stuff do we have?”

“A bunch actually. She has tons of it hanging in her office.” Barnes stretches. “Anyway, I don’t know if it’ll help your headache, but it should help your fever.”

In the time it takes for Barnes to return with some very weak, very bitter tea, Young has almost drifted off to sleep again. He forces down the tea while Barnes talks about some of the repairs they’d made progress on and something involving rabbit skin.

He sleeps off and on for an unknown amount of time, and every time he wakes there’s someone watching him – TJ, a tiny scientist patching a huge pile of underwear, several people futzing with the drop spindle, and Camille, carefully rolling a ball of yarn.

“Feeling any better?” she asks, when she sees he’s awake.

“I’ll get back to you on that.”

She smiles and goes to get the tea. “TJ and Dr. Rush have been doing a lot of talking these past few days,” she says, going back to her ball of yarn.

Young’s eyebrows shoot up. “Days? How long have I been sick?”

“Long enough. We’ve been worried.” She gestures to a small box beside her. “If you can stay awake, I brought dinner.”

Dinner turns out to be fruit flavored mush. Camille has some kind of flatbread sandwich. He looks back and forth between his bowl and her sandwich with surprise.

“You should feel lucky – it has actual ingredients in it.” She takes a healthy bite of her sandwich.

He gives her a look that she returns with a barely suppressed smile.

“As I was saying,” Camille says, when she’s halfway through her sandwich, “TJ and Rush have been talking a lot these past few days. Mostly about you.”

“What have they been saying?” Young hopes he comes off as nonchalant, but the look Camille gives him says he doesn’t quite succeed.

“Well, you’ll be happy to know that you’re not contagious. It’s something you picked up in the lab.”

Rush said it was another result of the genetic modification. Will he get a fever every time?

“TJ also said she noticed something…interesting about your hands. Webbed fingers.” She gives him a searching look. “Rush says it’s recent.”

Was Rush…covering for him?


	7. Chapter 7

He gets a steady stream of visitors, and TJ seldom runs them off. If she’s not sitting with him, someone else is, and he doesn’t understand it.

Is this something else he’s forgotten, after three years away from the ship? Is it because he’s colonel? What?

He thinks that he might have dreamt a few of them – those hazy dreams on the edge of sleeping and waking that seem as if they might be real.

There are times when everything seems like a dream. Maybe his nightmares are reality. Maybe those dreams he can’t remember are the times when he wakes up.

Sometimes words are just noise that he can’t begin to comprehend – and it isn’t just laying in the infirmary with a fever cooking him from the inside out, it’s everywhere, all over the ship, but the fever makes it worse, makes the edges of reality blur and bend, make him feel like a stranger in his own body. Makes everything…wrong.

He hates the dizziness and the weakness and the disassociation; never quite sure whether he’s asleep or awake, whether everything is real or not. Everyone he talks to says he’s getting better, but maybe they’re wrong.

If this is better, what was he like before?

TJ checks his temperature and his blood pressure, not looking him in the eye.

“TJ?”

She shushes him. “Deep breath in.”

He puts a hand on her arm. The infirmary lights reflect off the film between his fingers.

“You should have told me,” she says.

“I know.”

“Hey Colonel, I hear you’re feeling better.”

Young shrugs. “Somewhat.”

Eli nods. “Yeah, so I was thinking: we’ve got people making rope and spindles and leather, but what about fishhooks? Proper fishhooks.”

Young blinks. “You visited me in the infirmary to talk about fishhooks.”

“Maybe?” Eli scratches the back of his neck. “I heard you were awake, and Rush was being a little intense, and there’s no way he would’ve let me come if…”

“Eli.” Young hides a smile behind his cup of disgusting tea. “You were saying, about the fishhooks?”

“Well you passed out in Rush’s quarters, and you had a fever high enough to melt your brain. Also nightmares.” Chloe brings her feet up on the gurney, picking at her shoes. “You kind of…fell off the bed and almost strangled yourself with the sheets a few times. So we set up a watch to make sure you didn’t…die.”

Young’s almost sorry he asked.

“Matt’s nightmares usually wake him up,” she says softly. “But you never did. I tried sometimes – I couldn’t help it – and you…I don’t know if it was the fever or not. You never woke up.” Chloe hesitates. “I know it’s none of my business, but…what were you dreaming about?”

“I honestly don’t remember.”

“We were looking for water, but we found more sheep,” Evans says, showing  
Young the kino footage. “The wool’s a different color, but I’m pretty sure they’re the same species.”

“Are you even supposed to be on duty?” Volker asks, looking around for TJ. Eli shushes him.

“I’m not on duty,” Young says. “Evans is just keeping me company. Right?”

“Yessir. We’re not hard up on meat or anything, but we could use the extra wool. Who knows when we’ll have this kind of opportunity again?”

“What are you doing?”

Volker sighs. “Busted.”

“I said to keep him company!” TJ says, rounding a corner. “He still has a fever!”

“It wasn’t me this time,” says Eli, backing up.

“Out,” TJ orders, pointing sharply the door.

“But we-”

“Out!”

Evans slumps but obeys.

TJ raises her eyebrows at Volker.

“What? I have a legitimate reason to be here!”

Rush shows up in Young’s quarters. “I have a priority list for repairs,” he says, squinting at a tiny space on a new sheet of paper.

Young’s been out of the infirmary for maybe half a day, fever broken and on light duty again.  
He hasn’t seen Rush since the first day of his illness.

“Rush….”

“There’s another medical facility a short distance from hydroponics. If we repair he floor on the level above and create a ladder we may be able to…”

“Nick.”

Rush stops talking.

“Why did you cover for me?”

Rush tries for disdainful, but Young can see through it. “I was looking out for myself.”

Young’s lips twitch with the urge to smile. “Of course.”

Rush scowls at Young’s sarcasm, but goes back to his sheet of paper. “We have the materials for a ladder, and it could prove essential for-”

“ _Nick_.”

“ _What_?”

Young pulls him closer and kisses him. Young needs a shower and a shave, but Rush doesn’t seem to mind. He pulls away long enough to set down his paper and “pencil”, then he’s back, knocking their teeth together, biting Young’s lips, his jaw, his neck….

Young has too many things to say and not enough words to say them. They’re all important to him, and maybe they’re important to Rush, too, but he can’t; he can’t string the sentences together.

He thinks – no, he _knows_ – that Rush understands.


End file.
